


Wolves at the Door

by Nutkin



Category: Supernatural
Genre: Coda, M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-11-02
Updated: 2012-11-02
Packaged: 2017-11-17 15:06:03
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,247
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/552887
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Nutkin/pseuds/Nutkin
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Things can't ever be the same. Sam can't be, anyway. (Mystery Spot/Jus In Bello coda.)</p>
            </blockquote>





	Wolves at the Door

On Friday morning, Sam wakes up at seven-thirty. He brushes his teeth before he makes the bed, bending in on autopilot to tug the blanket and sheet up to meet the pillows. A steady hand smoothes them down before he steps away, and Dean keeps flipping through channels.

***

"I think I found something," he says in Ohio, and Dean shuts his book, clicks his pen so the tip goes down and then back up, and leans in over the table. "It's a combination of symbols that gained popularity around the turn of the century, but it should do the trick."

"No more gettin' possessed?"

Sam rubs an absent hand over the design on the page. "And hopefully no more tricksters. This is pretty powerful magical protection."

"Yeah, I've heard that before."

The place they hit is squeezed between a Mexican take-out restaurant and a smoke shop, and Dean makes his way through a taco as they wait their turn. 

"Man, some of this stuff is nuts," he says from the counter, thumbing through a book of designs. It's the standard skulls and roses they've both seen on countless bikers and truckers across the country, but Dean gets a little smirk at the corner of his mouth when he hits the kanji. "If we have any money left over, let's get you one of those tramp stamps that really means 'General's Chicken'."

***

He takes the bandage off on a Tuesday and gets a look at it for the first time. The design looks a little off from the swelling, skin an angry pink between the lines. 

"Come on, princess," Dean yells through the door. He beats his fist on it a few times for effect. "I gotta use the can."

They're a few towns away when Dean comes out from a shower without the gauze taped to his chest. He moves casually, like it's the last thing on his mind, but it's the first time Sam's seen it: an unfamiliar streak of dark against his skin. 

Dean's had the same build since he was fifteen or so; he never had much of a growth spurt. He got his first crew-cut from the barber’s shop in Bakersfield when he was in the seventh grade. He's looked more or less the same as far back as Sam can remember, but this is something different.

"Man, we gotta get a new kind of shampoo." His towel is slung low around his hips, droplets of water still falling from his hair. It looks truly brown when it's wet; that and the ink are the only real dark points on his pale body. "That stuff smells like fuckin' turpentine."

"It was the cheapest they had," Sam answers, and pulls at the front of his t-shirt. 

***

He doesn't tell Dean what he's doing, but there's no way he could really explain it. Arizona on March third, Tennessee on March twenty-first. Up to New York for a two-person possession at the beginning of April, and then a vampire nest in an old mill out in Oklahoma right around the equinox. 

It's the same path he took before, when it was just his hands doing all the work. With two people it's cake. 

If Dean seems to notice the answers coming a little too easily, he doesn't say anything. If he had to, Sam figures he could blame it on some residual power of their tattoos, or something. He doesn't know; all that matters is that he's not ready to leave anything to chance again. Not yet.

They stop at the same western-themed motel in Adele, Nebraska that Sam stayed in alone. It's not the exact room, but the wallpaper's the same lasso-and-wagon print, the sheets still tired-looking and brown. They turn in early, and it's not until the lights are out that Sam remembers jerking off under those papery covers. 

It was perfunctory then, like everything in his narrow world, but those moments when his hand was on his cock were always the most dangerous for him. The moment his guard came down, Dean would come back to him. Everything he didn't allow himself to think of during the day seemed to rush in to fill the void - the sound of his voice and the way he moved, the smell of him and the shape of his silhouette, the stretch of his bottom lip bowed under the weight of whatever straw or pen he was chewing. It was all there for him again, this swift undercurrent of pain that would collide head-on with desire.

"You asleep?" Dean asks after a few minutes, but Sam doesn't reply.

***

Towns in the southwest all look the same. 

There's this haunting in Arizona, a teenage girl's bones buried under the cracked mud outside of town. It's the kind of hunt that Sam would grind out in a day: he stood under the sun for as long as it took, blisters forming on his hands as he dug neat rectangles. He was methodical and slow, covered every inch of ground, and then filled it all back in.

Dean leaves the doors of the car open and the stereo turned up. He stops over and over to wipe the sweat off his face and look up at the sky, like he's willing the sun to go away for a while. Every half-hour he leans on his shovel and makes noises about how much they don't get paid for this gig, and then starts in on some sex story about girls at the last three bars they hit.

Sam can't even find it in himself to be irritated. He just watches Dean with a hunger that scares him, soaking up every quirk, every over-used phrase, every bad habit that's become a commodity. 

***

He catches Dean looking at his tattoo in mirrors sometimes. He always gives it the same scrunched-up expression, squaring his shoulders and turning to either side. Sam knows he's trying his hardest to believe it looks like something it's not - something badass, something tough. It's just like Dean to take anything thrown at him and try to make it his own, but Sam's pretty sure he won't have much luck with this one.

It shouldn't really matter that they have the same one; it's not really strange or notable for them. Sam's got five scars on his skin from Dean, and countless more from wounds Dean stitched shut. Dean still wears that pot-tin amulet around his neck, for luck or for nostalgia's sake. Some mornings Sam pulls on a shirt that Dean wore the day before and doesn't even care, too tired or busy to be bothered by the smell of someone else all over his skin. 

There's no real reason for it to feel strange, one more thing that connects them. He can't explain why it does.

***

The time he was alone isn't on the books. It hasn't aged him any and isn't part of the grand tally, but it happened. He feels it every time he opens his eyes in the morning, the grim thud of his heart against his chest and that first surge of adrenaline. He feels it every time Dean gets wounded and he sees blood seep through a shirt. For weeks, he still dreams of that diner, that desk, that woman in the pink sweater.

He remembers it every time he looks at Dean and knows that one day he'll be gone.

"Why the long face?" Dean asks in Abilene, capping the Tabasco sauce. He gives Sam his concerned expression as he cuts ups his eggs with the side of his fork, and Sam stirs his coffee and shrugs; he's grown used to silence.

It's not the pain of it that gets to him. Not the fact that he spent that time in limbo, or the memory of what it was like to only need a room with one bed. It's the fact that, in that reality, there was a life after Dean. He kept putting one foot in front of the other, kept surviving, kept eating and sleeping and driving down the highway. He got used to Dean not being there, and that's what really terrifies him.

Dean rubs absently at his chest through his t-shirt as he looks over the dessert placard in the middle of the table. It's not until Sam looks down at his plate that he realizes he's doing the same thing.

***

When he finally starts talking, it's like the break of a dam.

Dean's been cagey for days, getting more and more aware that something's going on he doesn't know about. He could stomach the need-to-know basis from their dad, but with Sam he's always felt entitled to every detail. His agitation is practically a physical thing, and at another time in his life that would have been enough to make Sam blurt it all out.

Now he waits for the right time.

It's a sunny day, one of the first of the year, and they've got ninety miles ahead of them to Pittsburgh. Dean's behind the wheel with a 7-Eleven Slurpee wedged between his thighs, mouthing absently along with Bachman-Turner Overdrive. 

"There's more to what happened with the trickster."

Dean cracks his knuckles and looks over at him. "What are you talkin' about?"

"It wasn't just a time loop. That was part of it, but after that you died for real. I didn't wake up anymore. And nothing brought you back. You were dead, and then..." he pauses, not quite sure how to finish. "You came back."

The car is quiet, and then Dean shrugs, flicking away all of the possibilities and tragedies in that sentence with one small move. "So I guess that makes two of us."

"You don't get it, Dean," he snaps. "It wasn't just two days for me. I didn't make a deal. It was -- it was months. I _buried_ you."

Dean doesn't say anything after that. Sam looks over at him a few times, and then realizes maybe Dean's gotten used to silence, too.

***

Later, when they're tucked in the Green River Suites and Sam's stretched out on his bed, Dean sits down next to him. The mattress creaks beneath them.

"I'm sorry," he says. Sam can feel his body heat seeping through his jeans.

"Dean," he starts, but Dean just shakes his head and touches the lines of Sam's tattoo.

It's a gentle touch, almost absent-minded, but it's a shock to Sam's senses. His heart seems to slam right up against the design, right up against Dean's hand, and there's a confused part of him that almost wants to laugh. 

Instead he shuts his eyes, and doesn't open them until Dean moves away.

***

He gets a bad gash torn into his leg when they take out a nest of vampires. 

Dean goes to wash his hands in the bathroom sink when they get in their room that night, and Sam doesn't even think before breaking open the medical kit and threading the needle. 

"Hey, hey, take it easy there, cowboy," Dean says when he emerges, and Sam doesn't know what he's talking about at first; he already has three stitches pulled through his skin.

Dean watches his face for a long moment before coming to squat down in front of him. His hands are still a little damp around the edges when he takes the needle from Sam's fingers, and there's something dark and knowing in his eyes.

"You don't have to do everything by yourself just yet," he says, voice low. "Okay?"

His hands move with the same gentle precision they always do when he's patching something up, but his voice is like steel, and each sting of pressure and blunt tug of thread seems to punctuate his words.

"I'm not dyin' yet and neither are you. We still got time. Believe me, Sammy, when I go, it's not gonna be a surprise to anyone. Least of all you."

He wants to say something, but the words that come to mind won't make it past his lips. He wants to say, _I'm so tired of losing you._ He wants to say, _you don't know what it was like._ He wants to say, _I can't fucking survive if you're not here, you asshole._

Dean makes this noise of surprise when Sam pulls him up on the bed, but he's quiet when Sam kisses him.

He holds his breath there against Dean's dry, soft lips, waiting for a punch that doesn't come. Dean just leans in against him, and Sam opens his mouth and lets the order he's built, everything that's kept him sane, come crashing down around them.

***

He almost lost count a few times, but he's pretty sure there were one hundred and seven Tuesdays in Broward County, Florida. He didn't have anywhere to keep a tally other than his head, but he knows that if he wanted to he could sit down and write out every way Dean died, and just count those. He's not that interested in the answer.

On a Thursday, Dean wakes him up just before the alarm with a hand pressing low on his belly. His eyes snap open, but the shock is gone, and that warm, heavy weight keeps him from sitting up.

"What day is it?" he asks, tilting his face away from the glare of sun. Dean's tattoo is dark against his pale, freckled skin, and Sam presses his mouth there.

"Today," Dean says, and touches the drawstring of his sweats.

-fin.


End file.
